Why we need to question everything
Erik Lindvall
CEO, Guringo Design Studio
Right now, society is on the edge, balancing between two prevailing paradigms, the fossil-based and the renewable. We as humans have already aquired the technology and the scientific knowledge we need to enter the new paradigm, now we just need to understand how we can best use it. One might argue that this is largely due to the difficulties we have when we try to use methods and processes developed for an earlier paradigm and use them to develop behaviors and structures for a completely new one.
Even the very definitions of words such as quality, consumption and energy will change if the foundations on which they rely on are changed.
Here, the cultural tools are fundamental as they not only fulfill the function of being intuitively graspable carriers of new insights, but they are also essential for the development of these new insights.
We need to question and reevaluate the premise of our present society and its systems without condemning, restricting or even comparing it with the old habitual behaviors and disciplines. Along with science and industry, the discipline of art and culture is fundamental for the development of our society.
No matter whether it is a new material, a physical art manifestation or a systematic, adaptive process, we need a whole lot of new definitions.
Out of a cultural perspective, it is important to provoke an ongoing, scientific research process and present to the general public alternative ways to consume and own. It is now time to raise questions concerning fundamental, existential phenomenas such as property, time, nature and the basic realization that we all are a loan of nature.